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Month: November 2019

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Marketing for Muppets – Part 7

The last Marketing for Muppets post appeared in March – it’s here if you’re interested: Part 6. I talked about my international BookBub deal and indicated that I probably wouldn’t do another marketing post unless I was successful in obtaining a BookBub deal in the US. So, yep, you can guess what happened.

Since being accepted in January for the international deal, I’d been applying for a US deal every four weeks and been refused every time. After a while, such regular knock-backs start to wear you down and when the reminder popped up in my calendar in mid-October, I almost didn’t apply. Just as well I did and it shows that persistence can pay off. I was offered a US deal on 16th November, which I accepted with alacrity. As before, it was for The Cleansing at a discounted price of $0.99.

I turned off the ad for the book on Amazon because I wanted to see whether BookBub still lives up to its reputation without the results being skewed by any other forms of promotion. In truth, the Amazon ad had been dwindling in effectiveness for a while—to put it into context, I’d sold the grand total of two copies of the book on Amazon.com in the previous thirty days. Advertising on Amazon is becoming tougher unless you have deep pockets, but that’s a possible topic for a future post—maybe Part 8 will make an appearance at some point although, as I said in the last part, I’m heartily sick of talking about marketing.

BookBub featured deals are not cheap. For a deal in the US for The Cleansing, the cost was $594—that’s £461. To break even at a sale price of $0.99, I’d need to sell around 2,000 copies. But that’s only if you look at direct sales arising from the promotion and ignore sales resulting from increased visibility and sell-through of the sequels. I wasn’t concerned about recouping the cost on the day, though I hoped to achieve around a thousand sales in total so that I’d stand every chance of good sales of the sequels.

In fact, I sold exactly 1,000 copies of the book on Amazon.com on the day. In addition, I sold around 200 copies on the wider channels, thus exceeding my hopes.

At the start of Saturday, 16th November, the book was ranking at around 126,000 in the US store. By the early hours of Sunday, the book had fleetingly gained an orange bestseller tag on Amazon.com for one of the science fiction sub-categories (thank heavens for screen shots) and peaked at 103 in the entire US Amazon store. (It might have climbed a little higher, even breaking briefly into the top 100, but if it did, I didn’t see it—this was all happening after midnight UK time and I had to snatch a few hours sleep.)

Around 60 copies of the sequels also sold that day and all three books have been selling steadily—on Amazon and in the wider channels—at their usual prices in the US since. There has been a knock-on effect with an increase in both audio and paperback sales of The Cleansing.

So, is BookBub worth the expense? I can only speak for myself (remember Proposition 1), and I’ve only had featured deals with the Earth Haven books, which have a high sell-through rate, but the answer is a resounding yes. Proposition 6 bears repeating:

Proposition 6: BookBub is an effective promotional site, especially for authors with sequels or a substantial back catalogue available to take advantage of sell-through.

And that’s enough about marketing. Unless I ever do feel the need for a Part 8, I’m going to concentrate on topics I find more appealing; anything else, then, essentially.

Till later…

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Audiobooks – Part 3

A brief update on my progress on producing my own audiobooks. There is so much to learn about the process, so much trial and error involved, that it has been all-consuming for the past few weeks and I haven’t made time to write any regular blog posts. So a hasty update it will have to be.

In Part 2, I mentioned my three main concerns. In ascending order, they are:

  1. I have no space in which to work that’s ideal for soundproofing;
  2. differentiating between characters without using accents;
  3. learning how to edit and master (and discovering what the heck ‘mastering’ even means) the recorded audio is going to be so steep a learning curve, the top is covered in cloud.

I’m only going to look at the first of these today—numbers 2 and 3 are very much still works in progress.

We have a small room at the front of our house next to the living room. We call it the study, a rather grand name for a space that’s big enough to hold a few slim bookcases, a small desk and not a great deal more. But it’s perfect as a workspace for a writer. It would also be the ideal space to record audiobooks, if not for one major drawback.

Our house fronts onto a busy road, separated only by a narrow path, some railings and a pavement (that’s a sidewalk for American readers). Vehicles go past with monotonous regularity. When it rains, which it does a lot here in Wales, the noise of the vehicles’ sloshing tyres is louder. Also, the wind tends to throw heavy rain against the study windows with the sound of hurled gravel. The noises don’t bother me when I’m writing, but would be a problem for recording clean audio.

I knew the study would be unlikely to work as an improvised recording studio, but nevertheless decided to give it a go. First, I taped up the windows with duct tape, hoping that would reduce the traffic noise.

Next, I thought of filling the window space with books, the idea being that any intruding traffic noise would hit the biblio-wall and die. I have enough books in the house to completely fill the window space, but the problem was that once I’d reached a certain height, the wall began to become a little unstable, being constructed as it was of books of varying dimensions and with only a narrow window cill (or sill, if you’d prefer) as a foundation. I didn’t like the thought of the wall toppling onto me in mid-narration so stopped construction when it was high enough to shield my desk and recording equipment, but with only about half of the space filled.

Finally, I draped a spare duvet over the window and biblio-wall, hung blankets on the wall behind me and came up with a nifty temporary blanket-hanging solution to cover the door so that it was a simple matter to uncover it to get in and out.

Then I was ready to record.

Yeah, it didn’t work. The road is too busy, my attempts at blocking the noise too ineffective. The sound of passing vehicles could be clearly heard on my first recordings. I began to pause narration whenever a vehicle was approaching but had to do that so often it was probably doubling the recording time and frustrating any chance I had of getting into a narration flow.

Time for Plan B. My younger daughter and her boyfriend have been living with us since graduating last year while they sort out permanent jobs and get themselves into a position where they can afford to get their own place. In the meantime, they’ve taken over the spare bedroom and my daughter’s bedroom has been used pretty much as a dumping ground. Her bedroom has one huge advantage over the study as a potential recording studio: it’s at the back of the house, away from the main road.

Long story short, we cleared the room sufficiently that I could position a desk with my back to a wall over which I could drape blankets or duvets and with space to do the same to the sides to provide an improvised sound booth. There’s room for a foldaway table to hold my laptop. I have surrounded my desktop sound booth with spare pillows and cushions to provide more sound insulation.

It’s still not a professional recording studio, obviously, but without the constant noise from the road, it is far more effective as a home sound studio and, apart from the occasional boy racer going past with an unmuffled exhaust, the roar of which reaches even my daughter’s bedroom, I no longer have to worry about external noise while I record my books.

That still leaves my narration and editing abilities. Hmm, perhaps lack-of-abilities would be more accurate, but I am improving. More on these in future posts.

Till then…

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From Page to Screen – Part 3

Favourite film adaptations

I thought it might be a bit of fun to list my top ten favourite film adaptations of books I’ve read. Until I sat down to compile the list and realised it’s not that easy because either the films haven’t measured up to the books, or I’ve enjoyed a film but not (yet) read the book upon which it’s based.

The other problem is that I have read a lot of books and watched a lot of films. I’m at that age where my mind refuses to hold onto names that leave no lasting impression on it. That being so, there might have been better film adaptations I’ve seen than some that make it onto the list, but that I’ve simply forgotten about. In fact, it’s quite likely.

Anyway, to the best of my knowledge, here follows in no particular order (I struggled to compile a list of ten, let alone having to rank them in order) my top ten film adaptations of books I’ve read.

The Lord of the Rings

One of my favourite books; one of my favourite adaptations— see From Page to Screen – Part 2 where I explain why.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

I can’t imagine anyone more suited to the lead role of Randle McMurphy than Jack Nicholson in his pomp. Add a breathtaking performance by Louise Fletcher as his nemesis Nurse Ratched and it makes for a superb film, at times hilarious, at others heartbreakingly sad.


One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

The 39 Steps

There have been many film and television adaptations of John Buchan’s adventure novel involving spy rings, military secrets and a man on the run. My favourite by far is the 1935 Hitchcock version, starring Robert Donat as the novel’s hero Richard Hannay. It is only loosely based upon the novel but, for me, improves upon the book with its ending.


The Thirty-Nine Steps

Blade Runner

Also mentioned in ‘From Page to Screen – Part 2’, linked above, this is one of those rare films that takes all that is good from the source material and improves upon it.


Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

The Da Vinci Code

I’m not a fan of Dan Brown’s writing style, yet I’ve read most of his books and will continue to do so because he tells a ripping yarn. The underlying concept behind this novel blew me away and I thought they did a pretty good job with the film version. Any film featuring Tom Hanks, Paul Bettany and Audrey Tautou (not to mention Ian McKellen and Alfred Molina) ought to be decent, and this one doesn’t disappoint.


The Da Vinci Code

Starship Troopers

The novel is up there, for me, with Robert Heinlein’s finest. The film version, although not originally even based on the book, does a great job of satirising the aspects, such as militarism and fascism, for which the novel came in for criticism. I thought both the novel and film were a great deal of escapist fun.


Starship Troopers

Stand By Me

This adaptation of Stephen King’s novella, The Body, just shades The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile as my favourite King adaptation. See From Page to Screen – Part 1 for more on this.

The Road

One of my favourite post-apocalyptic books. Unremittingly bleak and brutal, I couldn’t put it down. I sat to watch the film version with a little apprehension, but the film was as bleak and brutal, and as good, as the book. It’s also the first film I’ve seen starring Viggo Mortensen where I didn’t keep thinking about Aragorn.


The Road

Catch-22

The novel is a beguiling mixture of absurdism and grittiness, and I wondered how it could translate to the screen. Well, the 1970 film worked for me. What really made it was the casting of Alan Arkin as the central character John Yossarian. I watched the recent television serial adaptation, which was also a worthy effort, but couldn’t help comparing the actor who played Yossarian unfavourably with Arkin.


Catch-22

Day of the Jackal

The tension in the novel is superbly crafted and I doubted it could be reproduced on screen. How wrong I was. The film version, with Edward Fox in the title role, is as suspenseful as the book. They are both excellent.


The Day of the Jackal

Till next time…